Professor Dahan is a physician-scientist and anesthesiologist whose career has focused on advancing outcomes research in anesthesia, pain treatment, and respiratory physiology. He joined Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) as a staff anesthesiologist in 1995 and was appointed full Professor of Anesthesiology in 2004. Until January 2025, he served as Head of the Research Unit in Anesthesia and Pain, and now continues as Emeritus Professor, advising the research team and supervising doctoral candidates.

His research program centers on respiratory control, opioid pharmacology, opioid-induced respiratory depression and its reversal, anesthetic mechanisms, nociception monitoring, ketamine pharmacology, and innovative pain therapies. Supported by substantial national and international funding — including ZonMW (The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development), the U.S. FDA, the Department of Defense, and industry collaborators — his group includes 12 PhD candidates and four postdoctoral fellows. He has authored more than 500 peer-reviewed publications and pioneered an outcomes framework applying the economic principle of utility to integrate therapeutic benefit and unintended harms into a unified evaluative model. The unit participates in the ZonMW-sponsored TAPTOE consortium (Tackling and Preventing the Opioid Epidemic) through 2027 and collaborates closely with the U.S. FDA. He was knighted in the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands in 2020 and received the ISAP Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.

Professor Dahan earned his MD from the University of Amsterdam (1986) and his PhD from Leiden University (1990), and completed his residency in Anesthesiology at Leiden University Medical Center.